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0 pointslhorn17y ago0 comments

You said "not really" and then agreed with me. Moreover, you only confirmed my theory that when people say "open source" it usually means commercial companies milking OSS developers, or releasing their code "contributions" for products that have no commercial value to them (Obj-C, Chrome).

Where is the code for Aperture? Final Cut Pro? Numbers/Pages? Even iTunes? I also want to see the code for Google's page rank, BigTable and gmail.

I also want to see scribd code for converting MS Office documents to iPaper. 90% of their solution consists of Open Office code that they took freely and haven't released theirs in return.

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Zev17y ago

I was trying to say that a significant portion of the OS is open-source - not just GPL'd. It's hardly "milking the community" if a good portion is returned back in a similar manner.

I wouldn't say that WebKit is worthless; its the primary rendering engine behind several browsers - which are gaining in popularity due to the success of OSS in general.

If the web was so worthless, MS wouldnt have bothered with IE and Netscape wouldn't have open sourced the code for Mozilla. Nor would a majority of the HN startups exist for that matter.

silencio17y ago

I don't understand your disconnect between the licensing for the OSS projects in question and what you're saying, since I have yet to see Apple and others flagrantly ignore licensing terms. If this was such a big problem, change the license.

Besides, I can think of lots of projects where employees at corporations and "commercial companies" are being paid to work on OSS projects. I frankly doubt that OSS would have gone this far without such people.

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